It’s the week before Christmas and there is a palpable mix of excitement and relief emanating from Guy Nicholson.

The Toronto-based journalist-turned-independent-publisher has just learned that all his hard work and dedication over the past two years has finally paid off; the glossy Kickstarter-funded golf magazine he has envisioned is going to print.

“I don’t have any reason to believe it’s not the first golf magazine ever crowd-sourced for its launch, which is kind of cool,” says Nicholson, who will be printing 1,000 copies of what he hopes will be an annual publication.

“Some golf courses that are featured in the magazine stepped forward and bought almost 300 copies. Today was literally the day when those courses put the money in and then boom we were over the top.”

The result is Catalogue 18, billed as golf’s first subscription art magazine. It contains 300 pages of high-quality photos, paintings, and illustrations of courses from around the world by two dozen award-winning photographers and artists together in print for the first time.

It’s an ambitious project that required a unique vision to come to fruition. Nicholson needed to raise $45,000 to get the magazine to print and that’s where Kickstarter, a crowd-funding platform people use to get their creative projects off the ground, came in.

Guy Nicholson is the publisher of Catalogue 18 magazine.

“I hit refresh on my phone approximately 300 times a day on the Kickstarter page to see if any new pledges had come in, to see if there were messages from people who wanted to talk about how they could contribute,” says Nicholson, who largely used social media to get the word out on his project. “Kickstarter is all or nothing. If you’re funded, you charge forward. If you’re not, okay there’s no market for this and you let it go I’ve succeeded.”

As of Wednesday, 160 backers had helped Nicholson raise nearly $47,000, more than enough to put out the first issue, which includes collections from Pinehurst No. 2, Cabot Cliffs, The Loop, Doonbeg, Nordic Europe, the Coachella Valley and more. In all, there are images of nearly 200 courses from around the world shot or created by the likes of David Cannon, Evan Schiller, Gary Lisbon and David Scaletti, to name a few.

While the work of these professionals can be found on social media sites such as Instagram, Nicholson’s magazine, which has the weightiness of a coffee-table book and will include many photos that have yet to be published, gives them a grander platform.

“These pictures are big and in many cases bigger than just one page, a full spread,” an enthused Nicholson says as he holds up the magazine prototype. “If you really like this kind of material there’s no better place for it than these high-quality pages you can look at these images on your phone but you don’t put them on your coffee table and have people excited to pick it up and touch it and flip through it. It’s just a different kind of media and I think it’s the right media for this stuff.”

The magazine is divided into three sections: The Front, The Turn and The Back. Along with all the images are feature stories written by Jeff Brooke of the Globe and Mail and David Cannon, who has shot for Getty Images for many years. And, in some cases, the photographers describe their inspiration and ideas for the images they have submitted.

Catalogue 18 is a new golf magazine funded through a Kickstarter campaign. (CATALOGUE 18 PHOTO)

Via Kickstarter, people could pledge whatever amount they wanted to support the project, but $60, plus shipping, gets them the first issue delivered to their door. Those who pledged less will be acknowledged in the magazine.

Nicholson, who has been captivated by golf design ever since he was a kid walking his local course in Sioux Lookout, Ont., with his dad, says the idea for Catalogue 18 first came to him when he and his wife were driving back from a trip to Cabot Links in Nova Scotia. He had seen many images of the course before the trip but was struck by the beauty of the surroundings when he was there.

The Championship Course at Sand Hollow in Hurricane, Utah, is featured in Catalogue 18 magazine. (CATALOGUE 18 PHOTO)

“I was thinking how disappointing it was that there are so few places to see this stuff big and in a really immersive way, and how great it would be to actually have a magazine that used it that way,” says Nicholson, who at one time nearly abandoned journalism to pursue a degree in landscape architecture at the University of Guelph. “A lot of golf glossies focus on swing tips and the pro game and equipment. That’s a business model that’s been around forever. I like those magazine but it wasn’t how I wanted to experience the game.”

So after taking a buyout from the Globe and Mail, the life-long lover of golf set about contacting photographers and artists who specialize in this sort of work. He couldn’t offer them any money, just a high-end publication where their works could be displayed.

“It wasn’t a hard sell at all,” he says. “They all now work for resorts, for tourism boards, essentially their material gets used on websites, in brochures, goes on Instagram, and it doesn’t appear anywhere really big in print. And they all thought it would be really fantastic to have that, so they were very supportive right from the start.”

Having connections in journalism also helped Nicholson connect with Toronto-based designer Vanessa Wyse at Studio Wyse, who lent her talents to get the project off the ground.

With everybody on board, the driven Nicholson then had to make sure that his vision came to life.

“It took weeks of writing the Kickstarter campaign, thinking what might incentivize people to pledge whatever amount to help out you have to guess what your friends and family might want to do and then you have to guess what the public might want to do who don’t care about you or your product so much as they care about ‘what am I going to get from this.’”

The answer, Nicholson says, is a sumptuous 300-page magazine that every golf lover should have on their coffee table.

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